


Kindred

by spensierata



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Mild Sexual Content, Spoilers for anything after Je Souhaite basically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-12-16
Packaged: 2019-02-02 22:44:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12735819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spensierata/pseuds/spensierata
Summary: Mulder runs into an old X File while on the run.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A while ago i joked about writing a mulder/cryptid fic and i uh. did it. But it isn't Nessie and it isnt Flukeman. It's a little bit MSR angst. Tbh i don't know what it is.

She hadn't believed in any God, until she had become one. She hadn't believed in destiny either, until it had turned her into a party trick.

He told her the one thing he didn't believe in was fate, after she had found him in the city that never sleeps, sleeping in a rental car, blocking her drive way. 

She believes that Kismet is nothing but some sick god's sick joke, playing with the hearts of fools. She believed the twisted string of fate had stitched their paths together. She did not believe that it meant for anything good.

The least she could do was offer him her couch, she reasoned, since he was the only reason she had one to begin with.

Jenn had never had a roommate before, it was not an unwelcome change. After four months they had discovered were equally terrible at living. They both forgot to clean the dishes and forgot to pay the gas bill and forgot to get mad at the other about it.

It happened one night in cold December, her boiler had kicked the bucket. They huddled in front of a space heater, nursing their flat beers. 

The one thing she likes most about Mulder was that "We don't talk about me," was his one and only rule. Genies rarely get therapy, so she was ok with that. But she had drained the last of her Guiness and had a question she was itching to have answered.

"So, how's the baby?" she said out of the blue, making him choke on his malt liquor.

"how did you..." he began, before realisation caught up with him and hit him square between the eyes. It was almost the same look people had always gotten when she would twist their careless words against them; she revelled in the nostalgia of it. "It was you,"

"Nah, it was all you, buddy," she replied with a wry wink "I just helped you out a little,"

"But I didn't... I used my last wish to set you free,"

"And you did. And I was grateful. You should also be grateful that you didn't wish for me to stop being an all powerful being,"

Jenn snorted at the look of sheer dumb awe on his face, at the cautious twinge of terror. "Don't worry, i'm just your average gal with unlimited magical energy, who chooses to use it for the people I feel deserve it." 

Also maybe to win a scratch card or two. 500 years wrapped in a carpet doesn't qualify you for much, and a mortal's gotta eat. 

"So? Our little wish?" she prompted, nudging his shoulder heavily with her own.

He pulled the picture from his wallet. The wish was cute, chubby cheeks and a bright tuft of hair, looking content in the arms of his mother, gazing him with pure adoration. Jenn felt a rush of pride at what was probably her finest work.

"He's... perfect, Jenn, he looks just like his mother." The corner of his mouth twitches in the ghost of a smile. 

She doesn't know what possessed her to place her hand on his, but he turned his palm to meet hers and gently squeezed. 

An idea invaded in her head as he gazed forlornly at the photograph, the mother and the son, and the empty space where he should have been. A wish, a twisted, terrible, fucked up wish. Utterly and completely sick and wrong. Jenn wasn't entirely sure if it was his or hers. 

She didn't realise she was granting it until the freckles started to bloom on her skin. 

Mulder, with the keenest of senses, noticed the most subtle change in the hand he was holding, and his head snapped up, startled.

"Jenn," he gaped, his fingers continued to grip hers like a vice. 

"I have a talent, Mulder, for predicting one's deepest desire," she murmured in a voice not hers, "You pick it up after the first few hundred years," 

He drank her in for a long while, eyes roaming over her, intense and unreadable, she had to stop herself from squirming.

"So," breathed Jenn, "how did I do?"

The polaroid is face down on the coffee table. Mulder's free hand began to move, achingly slow, as if by its own accord, and pushed up the light blue fabric of her shirt. His fingers feather-light against her stomach, butterflies burst from their cocoons and began to flutter at his touch.

"She was shot, once. The bullet went straight through there," he finally whispered, "It nearly killed her. It nearly killed me too," 

The scar formed on her skin and she watched his expression darken. nobody had ever looked at Jennie with so much longing, and she began to ache. Her shirt disappeared along with her inhibitions and there was suddenly very little space between them, as an arm snaked around her, he drew slow circles with his knuckles on the small of her back. 

"She has a tattoo right there, I really fucking hate it,"

Fucked up. They were so fucked up. 

She felt a phantom needle breaking her skin, and her breathing becomes shallow. The tension in the air was suffocating as he cupped the base of her neck.

"This scar is new, it happened while I was gone," he travels down her spine, leaving a thin line of broken tissue behind, "Something about a parasitic slug," 

She let him discard her now ill-fitting bra the old fashioned way. Mulder examined the subtle curve of her body with an agonising tenderness. "She has a birthmark here," he said, as a thumb traced the underside of her breast. 

"And a mole right here," 

Jenn stifled a moan as he pressed his lips softly against her collar bone. 

"Here," he whispered again, lips on her shoulder now, his breath tickling her neck. 

"And here," 

She'd already counted for the mark on her lip, but that didn't stop his mouth from brushing over hers. She kissed him hungrily, urgently, a frenzy of teeth and tongues. 

The two of them so touch starved, they were ravenous. Pinning him to the unmade couch, her thighs locked tightly around his waist, grinding her aching wet heat against him as he hardened beneath his jeans. His hands were everywhere, on her breasts and in her hair and all the places he'd fixed. He found his way into her pants and they groaned into each other's mouths. 

His kiss became salty and she immediately broke it, halting the movement of her hips as she caught him wiping at the tears in anguish streaming down his face. 

Sick. They were sick.

"Mulder," Jenn panted, catching her swollen lip between her teeth, "We don't have to do this,"

"We shouldn't," he agreed, for a moment she was terrified that they wouldn't, before he flipped her on her back. 

He came inside her with Scully's name on his lips. Maybe that should have bothered her less. Maybe it should have bothered her more. But the buzz of the post orgasm high gave way to exhaustion.

When Jenn woke after what felt like a thousand years, her hair was dark once again and Mulder's clothes were gone.

She wished that she would see him again, if only to return the picture he forgot.


	2. Chapter 2

If there was one thing that could make her forgive the world for all its sins, it would be coffee. Jenn lived for coffee. She took it bitter and black and white and sweet, with ginseng and whipped cream and light, dark, medium roast. She’d seen the world and she hadn’t cared for it. One day she had woken up in the middle of nowhere and decided, hell, she might as well find something to live for she need not look any further than the warm mug in her hands.

The world, it seemed, had not forgiven her sins, however, as she read the name scrawled in black ink on Styrofoam, “Flat White for Mulder,” she called after the final shockwave came to pass, and locks eyes with a familiar face. 

"I don't remember rubbing any lamp,"  
  
Time had carved lines around his eyes and forehead but hadn’t seemed to dull that wry wit of his. Jenn snorted and bit back an innuendo. She ducked under the counter and embraced him warmly as old friends do. 

“You haven’t aged a day,” he told her, a truth she already knew. 

“Well, ya know,” she replied, “I moisturize,”

 She took five and put his caffeine on her paycheck, he invited her to dinner in return. To catch up, of course, as old friends do. They don’t get around to eating, as he starts with the grand tour.

The house was too big for a bachelor pad, the bedroom lacked a woman’s touch and the front yard was missing a tire swing. Pictures of them were pinned alongside the newspaper cuttings covering the floral wallpaper of his study. Scully who managed to look both ethereal and homely, a baby face in a suit to a woman with tired eyes and a waterfall of red hair, and their son, a forever immortalized infant.

“What happened to them?” she asked when curiosity got the better of her, she never had gotten the hang of beating around the bush.

“We don’t talk about me,” Mulder reminded her with a hollow smile. Jenn filled in the blanks from there and let out a frustrated sigh.

“Humans,” she muttered under her breath, earning her a curious look. 

“You don’t consider yourself human, Jenn?” he asked.

“I think after all the things I’ve seen and done,” She replied with honesty after weighing several sly remarks, “I don’t think I really deserve to,”

“I feel that too, sometimes,” Mulder told her softly, his was hand warm and steady on her shoulder. Maybe they deserved each other.

She turned back to the wall of half-baked conspiracy theories and broken memories. Her fingers ghosted over Scully’s face, frozen forever in a challenging smirk, and by its own accord, her hair turned red.  
  
Mulder took her by surprise as he pressed her roughly against the door, her choppy hair balled tightly in his fist.  
  
"Don't," he growled, "I don't want her,"  
  
The twitch of his hips against hers told another story, the darkness in his eyes. He isn’t hers to take, she knows, of course, she knows. It’s painted all over his face in shades of pain and betrayal and hope and desire. He’ll love her ‘til his heart gives out.

Copper is a conductor. The current rising in her spiked and Mulder jolted back at the shock.

 “Sorry,” Jenn gasped, and let her hair return to normal, black as an oil spill, still mussed from the ghost of his grip. “I’m sorry, I…”

 Her words are left hanging in the air, as Mulder’s mouth was on hers and his tongue making use of her parted lips.  

“I can’t… think about her right now,” he breathed as she moves to suck at his pulse. She soothed him with a thought and the pressure of her tongue at his throat. If all he wanted to forget, his wish was her command.  

“Then don’t,” she replied, and in a flash of white, they were in another room. Jenn busied herself by tearing the shirts from their bodies while Mulder was left reeling. She pushed him gently down onto the unmade bed, and to his fate, he went willingly. 

She pinned his wrists above his head with her mind as her hands explored every muscle and wrinkle and scar all these years had cursed him with. She teased him through layers of cotton, rocking lazily as she dragged her nails over his stomach and his chest, revelling in making him whimper and moan. It was the jolt of his hips and the frustrated hiss as she grazed his nipple with her teeth that made her give in and finally push the ruined fabric aside. Jenn groaned as he filled her, her power came undone. With his hands now free they gripped her waist hard enough to leave bruises. They never broke their desperate rhythm as she lowered herself to meet his kiss halfway. 

"Don't leave," he murmured into her hair, once they were both worn and slick with sweat. His arms tightened around her like he would never let her go. Jenn was coming down and had the worst inkling that she wasn't really the one he was talking to.  
  
She stayed still until his hold around her went slack. She lingered only to pin a picture on his wall, that picture, she mused, really made the house complete. Jenn stepped out into the rose-gold dawn, any inkling of sadness drained as the sun peeked over the yellow field. Jenn felt truly freed as the door clicked shut behind her.


	3. Chapter 3

Once upon a time, it was all about survival. You lived until you died. You found something or someone to make it worth it, filled every pointless moment in between sleeping and not sleeping, drinking and regretting, hating, loving, fucking, killing each other in an attempt to forget the meaningless of it all, because it would all end anyway. Things were simple and boring and she so foolish and desperate to try to wish her way out. Fate twists like a knife.

 

The world was at peace. Millions of wishes granted. Billions of people gone.

 

Jenn was numb by the time it was done. She’d curled up in her crawl space and tried to block out the screams and the tremors and the overwhelming stench of smoke, after hours which stretched like a century, it was over.

 

She stumbled into no man’s land, the clouds made of dust. She cleared the air with a breath and wandered towards the wailing, the siren signalling the presence of another soul. A woman amongst the ruins of a house, and boy, was she not at all happy to see her.

 

“Why didn’t you _do_ anything?” she raged, a ginger spitfire, seething and boiling with hurt and loss and contempt. “Why didn’t you save him, what good are you if you can’t _bring. him. back_ ,”

 

Every one of her words was another stab wound to the chest, but Jenn pushed away. Because god help her, she felt for the woman she had helped betray, she knew better than anyone that living forever is only curse if you had nothing left to live for, when you can do nothing but stand by as your loved ones inevitably wither and succumb to ash and dust.

 

Scully’s intense fire eventually burned to embers, her grief quietly fluctuating between stages four and five. Jenn had lived the cycle enough times to empathise, She’d seen it before, she’d lived it and breathed the smoke. She looted just to have something to do, she dutifully provided for her companion, gave her space as they waited out the sun.

 

“I didn’t know you were immortal,” She thought out loud after days of empty silence. Jenn’s people skills were rusty, but the glare Scully gave her clued her in that was the wrong thing to say. “I mean if I had known…”

 

“You’d what? Taken his mortality instead of fucking him?” Scully scorned. Well, it seemed like the end of times was a good a time as any for _that_ conversation.

 

“If… it makes you feel any better,” Jenn said, swallowing her guilt after an uncomfortable silence, “in some twisted way… I knew the whole time he was only thinking of you,”

 

“That does not make me feel better, Jenn,” Scully sighed, “But he was a man of many soul mates. I don’t blame you, I don’t. It wouldn’t do us any good now, anyway,” bitterness seeping into her words like the freezing wind seeped into their bones.  Jenn shivered and fuelled the fire with her mind. A random thought popped into her mind. Why hadn’t it occurred to her to heat that shitty apartment herself? Oh, wait. She knew exactly why.

 

“You know, Dana, Mulder was a little screwed up…”

 

“That’s putting it lightly,” Scully almost mustered a smile.

 

“But if his biggest flaw was that he cared too much, you should know, he cared about you more than anything,” Jenn said, “I just… wanted him to be happy, I felt like I owed him that much,”

 

“He wished for my happiness over his, he was the first person in over 500 years to ever even think of it,” She told her sincerely, “I tried to make him happy in return, I wanted him to be happy with you,”

 

Scully hesitated, resigned in forgiveness, battling her inner sceptic. “He told me… he said that you _became_ me…”

 

Jenn was silent in her guilt, but Scully ploughed on, cupping Jenn’s dirty face in her dirty hands, running a gentle finger over the mole on her left cheek. “If I can forgive him, there’s no reason to not forgive you. Mistakes are human nature, it’s coded in our genes and written in the stars,”

 

Jenn smiled despite herself, and closed the gap between them, pressing her lips lightly to the Scully’s cheek, capturing a stray tear leaving a trail of white in the ash and blood. The last two women on earth embraced and shuddered as they mourned the man they’d lost. Animosity evaporated along with the last of the human race. Somewhere out there amongst the ruins, there were survivors, monsters like them to inherit. But out there was also one scared little boy praying for his mother to come home. Jenn could feel it, the weight of her debt, a glimmer of hope for survival.

 

“I’m glad I found you. Both of you,” Jenn whispered into the crook of her neck, breathing in sweat and soot and sweetness.

 

“I’m glad you found us, too,” Scully replied, and the two women sat and held each other as they watched the world burn.


End file.
